Lizzie Buchen: Keeping low-risk inmates behind bars does not enhance public safety; in fact, doing so may endanger the public, as excessive prison terms hamper reentry, damage families, and weaken communities.
Transformative Justice and Mass Incarceration: Can Faith Communities Help Create a New Frame?
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Rev. Peter Laarman: A safe society is first and foremost a just society. In that respect we have an awfully long way to go. Let’s not waste any more time.
Why Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz Must Be Released From Solitary Confinement
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Angola 3 News: This month, a 30-day action campaign was launched demanding the release of Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz from solitary confinement, where he has been held for over 23 consecutive years, and 28 of the last 30 years, in Pennsylvania prisons.
Why Jerry Brown Bucks Prison Realignment
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Gov. Brown’s recent actions show that it is not just the most visible partisans of the “prison industrial complex,” who we must persuade or overcome, but unfortunately the political establishment of the State.
Expecting Black Men to Play in Stadium Named After Prison
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Bruce Reilly: I highly doubt any of the 99 players of the Florida Atlantic Owls were consulted about playing in The GEO Group Stadium next year, named after the world’s largest prison-owning corporation. I also doubt I need to illustrate the percentage of the Owls roster who are Black, or the percentage of The GEO Group’s “roster” are Black.
Strategizing to Defeat Control Unit Prisons and Solitary Confinement
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Angola3News: Being sent to a control unit prison is tantamount to torture. Prisoners are held under conditions that today are not considered ‘humane’ even for animals. They are an extreme abuse of state power.
Coalition Pushes LA’s DA Candidates On Mass Incarceration Issues
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Peter Laarman: With Public Safety Realignment now underway, the DA’s role becomes even more pivotal. What our chief prosecutor believes and does has a huge impact on incarceration levels.
Amnesty International Denounces Torture in California Prisons
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Angola 3 News: Amnesty International considers that the conditions of isolation and other deprivations imposed on prisoners in California’s SHU units breach international standards on humane treatment
California Prison Guards Treatment of Visitors
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Cayenne Bird: The prison guard Brassiere Brigade at Sierra Conservation Center went to great lengths to deny me an important visit for no valid reason and construed my informing them that I intended to report the events that transpired in my columns as a “threat” to the guards who oppressed me.
Community-Based Solutions: No Prisons No Jails — June 23
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Come to a community meeting Saturday, June23, that confronts the financial choices that LA and California’s politicians are making to invest our resources in policing and imprisonment, rather than the services we need.
Selling State Prisons
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Bruce Reilly: ALEC and for-profit prison lobbyists are fighting to stop the decriminalization of marijuana, to lengthen sentences, eliminate Good Time credits, curtail parole, incarcerate immigrants, maintain mandatory minimums, and increase Three Strikes laws because these efforts will increase their profits. But is this in the public’s best interest?
Prison Realignment or Expensive Musical Chairs
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Sharon Kyle: Given the public’s short attention span, it’s no wonder juicy celebrity gossip and salacious headlines have come to dominate the “news”. This is great for those who don’t want us to pay attention.
Mass Incarceration: Points of Agreement on the Right and the Left
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Diane Lefer: When a community sees daily injustice and doesn’t see the rule of law equally applied, it becomes morally and ethically easier to choose to live in a lawless way.
America’s Top Lobbyists on Criminal Justice Reform: Legal? Proper?
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Bruce Reilly: For years I watched the full-time lobbyist of the Attorney General, their legislative specialist, testify against practically every attempt to reform the criminal justice system.
Should We Crash the Prison System by Demanding Trials?
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Bruce Reilly: If everyone refused a plea bargain and went to trial, the system would crash. This maneuver is not new. I could have never organized these men to refuse plea bargains and go to trial for several reasons.
Santorum, Romney Square Off on Felon Disenfranchisement
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Bruce Reilly: Romney, at first, beat around the bush. “I don’t believe people who have committed violent crimes should be given their right to vote.”
Two Triggers: One Stuffed, One Deflated
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Although I have to admit I found it a bit creepy, the stuffed remains of Roy Rogers’ beloved steed was displayed on a Rose Parade float honoring Roy’s 100th birthday. Dangerously wobbling at the front of a somewhat over-the-top float, this Trigger, though dead, looked fat and healthy. The state budget Triggers, on the other [...]
California Ending Funding of Child Prisons
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Bruce Reilly: I am not too troubled possible financial bankruptcy due to prisons, particularly child prisons. The possible moral bankruptcy, however, runs much deeper than any bottom line.
Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons
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Victoria Law builds upon her earlier prison abolitionist critique by discussing practical alternatives for effectively confronting gender violence without using the prison system.
Prisons or Higher Education, Which Do We Fund?
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Sharon Kyle: Either large segments of the American population suddenly decided to engage in criminal activity or there were changes in sentencing law and prison policy that dramatically increased America’s prison population. Whatever the reason, states are spending more on prisons and less on higher education.
More Black Men in Prison Than Were Enslaved II
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Prison Based Gerrymandering Vote ecently we ran a piece written by Dick Price entitled, “More Black Men Now in Prison System Than Were Enslaved“. Tens of thousands read it. Many left comments. The popularity of his article and the comments posted lead to this follow-up. The article Dick wrote was a recap of a talk [...]
More Black Men Are in Prison Today Than Enslaved in 1850
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Dick Price: “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday
Cut the Real Wasteful Government Spending
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Mark Dempsey: The U.S. currently spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military but less than 2% of its budget on humanitarian aid, even if clean water would do more to promote peace.
Portantino Proposes Alternative to Early Release Prison Reform Efforts
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Anthony Portantino: Assemblymember Anthony Portantino (D-La Cañada Flintridge) has introduced legislation that shifts the prison reform debate from an early release and sentencing reform emphasis to stopping the revolving door at California’s prisons.
Bradley Manning’s Torture Commonplace in U.S. Prisons
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Sherwood Ross: Those supporting Manning need to recognize he is an icon for the bizarre, systemic destruction of tens of thousands of other human beings locked away in perpetual silence by their tormentors, often for mere infractions of prison rules, without the review of any judge or jury.
How to Keep Parolees Out of Prison
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Donna Purdue: We can posture and make demands of corporate America, but we must realize that while there is the occasional bleeding heart Liberal at the helm of some companies, most are run by strict, capitalist business men and reaching out to anyone has to mean there’s something in it for them.
Blacks Prison and Unemployment
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Sherwood Ross: Slumlords charge exorbitant rents. “Convenience” stores charge higher prices. Military recruiters have their pick of jobless youth desperate for work. And the for-profit, private prisons increase their head count (and income) as the judicial system hands off the young drug peddlers caught in the legal web. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported, African-Americans fill 40 percent of the nation’s prison cells. Yet they make up just 13 percent of the nation’s population.
Bush Recession Comes Home to Roost
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Adam Eran: Tax cuts caused the current budget deficit, not crazy spending. Local government revenues fell 57% after Proposition 13. Even more egregious, the consume-atives™ (they do not conserve), now complain that State funding for local governments to fill that revenue hole meddles too much in local affairs.
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